Tractatus 6.54 and S.N Ganguly: An Indian Wittgensteinian in Retrospect

'Tractatus, since I first read it, has been a constant source of philosophical inspiration to me' so says Ganguly in the preface of his book Wittgenstein's Tractatus: A Preliminary. This extraordinary commentary on Tractatus is unique in the sense that it has discussed all the commentaries available at that time while examining and critiquing, wherever necessary, the commentaries as well as the original with utmost passion and sincerity. His approach to the author was feasibly sympathetic and sensitive, though he never fails in his duty of being a rigorous critique while examining an apparent inconsistency or weak arguments. As it is nearly impossible to deal with all the contentious topics of the Tractatus that Ganguly dealt with in a single paper, I would like to concentrate only on the fundamental claim of Ganguly that the Tractatus 6.54 cannot really get Wittgenstein out of the paradoxical situation. Hence the paper will be divided into three main sections. In the first section, the paper will deal with the palpable paradox that results from the reading of Tractatus 6.54 and the controversies involved in various interpretations of the paradox. In the second section, there will be an attempt to focus on the problem of description in the distinction between saying and showing, between thinking and imagining, between thought and reality in order to understand the annotation of T6.54 by Ganguly. In the third section, there will be an attempt on my part to interpret the paragraph Tractatus 6.54 in the light of the distinction between Sinnloss and Unsinn from a non-resolute perspective and evaluate Ganguly's account of the paragraph in question from that perspective.